Almost ninety years after the death of Prohibition, Canadians are still wading through the red tape of temperance.

Like in Alberta, liquor inspectors can arbitrarily censor the entertainment at a licensed venue if they find it to be “bizarre, grotesque or offensive.”

Or B.C. where a movie theatre was brought to the brink of bankruptcy after obtaining a liquor license, and then discovered that due to an obscure loophole in local liquor laws, it was no longer able to show movies.

And, despite much-publicized federal efforts to the contrary, in Quebec, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan, it is still technically illegal for a consumer to web-order a case of wine from their favourite Canadian winery.

While they seem ludicrous now, they are all laws that were laid down to keep Canadians out of their cups. Historically, when Canadians have sat down to figure out how to curb drunkenness, they have inevitably turned to the “dry” models of tight controls, high taxes and strict schedules regarding where, when and how alcohol can be purchased.

But if recent campaigns to legalize public drinking, loosen pub rules and put booze in convenience stores are to be believed, many Canadians are clamouring to shed the bonds of temperance, bring alcohol out of the shadows and usher in a society in which the country is allowed to drink like responsible, wine-sipping Europeans — rather than unhinged, beer-swilling colonials.

Of course, as drinking reformists call to seek to transform a nation of chuggers into tasters, the end result may be always easier said than done.

“We feel that criminalizing alcohol and being restrictive is the same rationale as Prohibition — it results in more illegal drinking and British Columbians don’t learn to deal with it in a responsible manner,” said Elin Tayyar, executive director of Campaign for Culture, a Vancouver-based group pushing for liberalized B.C. alcohol laws.

We feel that criminalizing alcohol and being restrictive is the same rationale as Prohibition

On his group’s laundry list: The legalization of Happy Hours and an end to the legal distinctions between pubs and restaurants. Although the two kinds of establishments often look the same to outside observers, pubs do not allow children due to its “liquor primary” classification.

Of late, the likes of Mr. Tayyar’s camp appear to be making strides. In the buttoned-down drinking regimes of English Canada, each successive year is bringing a loosening of age-old alcohol laws.

Ontario kicked off a spate of alcohol reforms two years ago with a new law that allowed music festival-goers to sip their brews in front of the stage, rather than in a segregated beer garden.

The province may be moving towards the once-unthinkable policy of selling alcohol in convenience stores — rather than merely at government-run outlets. In June, Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa departed from a longtime Liberal government policy of outright rejecting private liquor sales by saying he would look into it.

This summer, even the prospect of public drinking hit the province’s psyche. After a police crackdown on public quaffing, a public meeting on park safety was swarmed by advocates calling for the legalization of open containers in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods park — a popular place for locals to sneak a hidden drink on hot days.

Inevitably, proponents of these alcohol reforms insist Canada would do well to usher in a drinking culture that is more in line with Western Europe: A culture where alcohol is merely food to be enjoyed over meals, rather than a numbing drug to be guzzled to excess.

“It strikes me that we’ve got a very puritan system built in,” said Daniel Fontaine, former chief of staff to Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan, and a proponent for legalized beach drinking. “In France, you have a glass of wine with the family and it’s not something mystical, it’s just part of the fabric of the culture.”

Or Germany, where beer is available 24 hours a day at newsstands, gas stations, on public transit and — as dozens of incredulous tourists can attest — it is indeed cheaper than bottled water. Despite this, German cities seem to carry on with a minimum of alcohol-fuelled chaos, at least by the standards of any North American college town or hockey riot.

“Yes, Germans drink too much,” wrote the U.S. blogger Mark F. Weber during a 2011 sojourn to Europe. “Somehow, they remain disciplined about it.”

Yes, Germans drink too much

This is not due to any chemical difference in German alcohol. Rather, evidence points to it largely being a product of German culture.

The phenomenon was detailed most famously in the 1969 book Drunken Comportment. In it, cultural anthropologists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton examined drinking cultures around the world and found radically-different approaches to how the world’s people handled their booze.

“Over the course of socialization, people learn about drunkenness what their society ‘knows’ about drunkenness; and, accepting and acting upon the understandings thus imparted to them, they become the living confirmation of their society’s teachings,” they claimed.

Some, like Italians and Jews, traditionally drink strictly in moderation. Others, such as the Camba people in Bolivia, drank industrial quantities of liquor at ritualized gatherings — but kept the ceremonies remarkably free of violence or uninhibited sexuality.

For much of Canadian history, alcohol has been a social lubricant, an escape — and a convenient excuse for unhinged behaviour. Indeed, the concept of alcohol as a “free pass” to criminal behaviour has even been enshrined in Canadian law.

In 1989, after a heavy night of beer and brandy, Quebecer Henri Daviault sexually-assault a semi-paralyzed, 65-year-old woman. Five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that Daviault could defend himself on the basis that he was too drunk to know what he was doing.

At the same time, Canadian alcohol researchers consistently tout “dry” temperance-style measures as the best way to curb alcoholic ills.

In 2007, for instance, Health Canada gathered the country’s top alcohol researchers and drew up a 31-page report outlining their recommendations for a National Alcohol Strategy.

Tellingly, almost all of the 41 recommendations advised a tightening of Canada’s current alcohol regime, from raising alcohol taxes to breaking apart the Canadian homebrewing industry.

Tim Stockwell director of the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C., says the idea of turning Canadian drinkers into Europeans is nothing new.

“This is quite an old chestnut; the idea that there is some kind of utopian healthy approach to alcohol in Europe … and all we have to do … is dismantle the alcohol monopolies and lower prices to achieve it,” he wrote in an email to the National Post.

France and Germany have higher alcohol attributable death rates than Canada

Rather, “wet” alcohol policies are often pooh-poohed by researchers as a surefire way to ensure more alcohol goes down the population’s gullets — and sows the seeds of increases to alcohol-based illnesses.

“Higher availability will increase the burden of disease due to alcohol but most of the effects would not be seen immediately,” wrote Jürgen Rehm, a researcher for the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, in an email to the National Post.

In short, whatever lives are saved from bar fights and alcohol poisoning could just as easily be paid with more 50-somethings dying early of liver failure.

Added Mr. Rehm, a German-Canadian who also works in epidemiological Research at Germany’s Dresden University of Technology, “France and Germany have higher alcohol attributable death rates than Canada.”

For all the dreams of “continental” drinking cultures, the whole concept may simply be a mirage.

No country has fetishized the idea of “continental drinking” more than the U.K., a land so crippled by binge drinking and pub fights that, in 2010, the government saw fit to fund the development of a shatter-proof pint glass.

Maybe it’s our Anglo-Saxon mentality. We actually enjoy getting drunk

In 2005, under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair, authorities allowed pubs to stay open 24 hours a day in a bid to teach the hard-drinking Brits how to embrace the “café culture” of drinking in moderation.

The policy certainly did not curb British binge drinking, and many critics contend it actually made the problem worse. In April, a paper presented to the Royal Economic Society claimed that the sheer number of hangovers spurred by the new laws caused absenteeism rates to rise 1.7 per cent across in England and Wales.

In fact, instead of English youth learning to drink like Continental Europeans, Continental Europeans are beginning to drink like the English.

In Germany, a rise in youth binge drinking prompted, in 2008, an incredible 22% surge in hospitalizations for adolescent girls suffering from alcohol poisoning.

In France, the increase in “le binge drinking” forced the country’s General Commission of Terminology and Neology, this summer, to invent a new phrase to describe the once-alien concept of quickly drinking oneself to intoxication: “Beuverie express.”

Taming intoxication in a society with a strong temperance history must be seen as a formidably difficult aim

Faced with the plague of Anglo-Saxon-style drinkers, European authorities have been getting downright temperate.

In 2011, Hamburg, home to the notorious Reeperbahn nightlife district, banned alcohol on its public transit network. The year before, the German state of Baden-Württemberg tried to crack down on alcohol-fuelled crime by banning alcohol sales after 10 p.m.

If Canada followed the European route of alcohol liberalization, “yes, for several years or so there could be immediate chaos,” wrote Ruth C. Engs, a professor emeritus at the Indiana University school of public health, in an email to the National Post.

But once abusive behaviour could be sufficiently “frowned upon,” soon “within a few years young adults would less likely do dangerous drinking.”

Robin Room, a renowned alcohol researcher who has worked in Australia, Canada the United States and Europe, is less optimistic; positing that a temperate North America could take generations.

In a 1991 paper on the subject, Mr. Room speculated that “Mediterranean wine culture” as we know it may well have been learned through a costly, “centuries long process.”

For several years or so there could be immediate chaos

Thus, Canada could one day live the idyllic existence of Italian-style self-restraint (what Mr. Room called the “dream of a better society”) but the price may be “tolerating a huge number of extra casualties” along the way.

“All in all, taming intoxication in a society with a strong temperance history must be seen as a formidably difficult aim,” he wrote, adding that it was doubtful societies had the “patience” for such an endeavour.

Against all this, however, Canada’s drinking reformers contend that, at least in the urban parks of Toronto and Vancouver, this taming is already underway.

Indeed, there is already no shortage of responsible drinkers on Vancouver beaches watching the sunset with a bottle of pinot noir — only to quickly squirrel the bottle away when they see the approach of an ATV-mounted police officer.

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